About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

26 September 2014

Lila Oliver Asher

Back in December 2013 through March this year, the little art gallery at Maplewood Park
Place, the residence where my mother lives in Bethesda, Maryland, hosted an
exhibit of prints by area printmakers.There
were three or four artists whose work was on display, showing perhaps half
a dozen prints each.Among the most
appealing, both for their subjects and their style, were the linoleum-block
prints of Lila Oliver Asher, who also attended the opening for the show.My mother made it a point to be there, too,
because it happens that Mom and Lila Asher have been friends since their
childhoods, some 80 years ago or so.(Mom and Lila met at Camp Wa-Na-Gi on Lake George, New York, when my
mother was a camper and Lila was a counsellor.)Mom’s a New Yorker who grew up in New Jersey and Lila’s a Philadelphian,
so the fact that they each ended up in Washington (they both live in the
Maryland suburbs now) at the same time is an amazing coincidence, I think.They both arrived in D.C. in 1946—my mom in February
and Lila in May—so their husbands could take jobs in the city, Sydney Asher, Jr., as a lawyer for the National
Labor Relations Board and my father as an executive in a local movie-theater
corporation.Since I was born in the
District at the end of that same year, I’ve known Lila literally all my life.

Lila Estelle Oliver was born in Philadelphia in 1921, where
she started drawing as a child, receiving her first set of oil paints as a
birthday gift from her parents when she was seven.“I was always aware that I wanted to be an
artist,” she wrote later in a biographical sketch. Then Lila went on to study in a children’s
program at what became the Samuel S.
Fleisher Art Memorial (formerly the Graphics Sketch Club, now affiliated with
the Philadelphia Museum of Art).In 1939, the incipent artist received a four-year scholarship to the Philadelphia
College of Art (now the University of the Arts).Among the distinguished artists with whom she
studied were landscapist Joseph Grossman (1889-1979) and portraitist Franklin B. A. Linton (1871-1943),
a protégé of realist painter,
photographer, and sculptorThomas Eakins. Lila also studied with Gonippo Raggi (1875–1959), an Italian-born church
muralist, but she started out to be a portrait artist.

Before graduating from PCA in 1943, in the middle of World
War II, Lila began sketching wounded GI’s in hospitals for the USO,
volunteering with the newly-formed Hospital Sketching Program (1943-1946).The drawings were both entertaining and
therapeutic for the invalided servicemen, and Lila was also a good listener,
chatting with the boys, so immobilized by their injuries that they couldn’t
attend the song-and-dance USO shows being offered nearby, and hearing their
tales as she sketched.The young artist
was flattered to be asked—some of the other artists recruited were quite
established already—and she felt she was putting her artistic ability to use to
serve her country; if she’d been a man, she thought, she’d have been drafted to
fight, so this was a way of doing her bit.Visiting veterans’ hospitals all over the area, from Philadelphia to
Valley Forge and Atlantic City, for as much as six days at a time, to draw and
paint the portraits, “I became a one-woman USO show,” she likes to say.“And literally, I sat from bed to bed,” she
recalls. “I sat on a bed with a young
man and did a sketch,” later collecting many of the 3,500 portraits she created
in a book entitled Men I Have Met in Bed
(Heritage Books, 2002), which includes the transcripts of many of the often
humorous letters she wrote to her wounded subjects.Unable to accept payment for the drawings,
though many of her subjects offered, Lila collected the shoulder patches of the
GI’s units—so she’d “have an insignia from all the different areas”— assembling
the more than 200 emblems into a little quilt which is depicted in the book.

Married in 1946, Lila Asher (she uses her full name, Lila
Oliver Asher, professionally) moved to the Nation’s Capital three years after
she graduated from PCA and established a studio for painting, sculpture, and
printmaking in a $25-a-month space in Northwest Washington.To supplement her art, she took a job
illustrating advertisements for Charles Schwartz Jewelers and upscale men’s
clothiers Lewis & Thos. Saltz.For
Schwartz, she drew pictures of the gems, which the store gave her to take home
in a little paper bag.

The young artist soon began teaching art at local colleges and
universities.She started in Howard
University’s Art Department, the oldest academic art department in the Nation’s
Capital, from 1947 to 1951, where her students included Romare Bearden (1911-88), among the most
distinguished American artists of the 20th century; Franklin White, Jr. (dates
unknown), a well-known Washington artist and instructor at the Corcoran School
of Art; and David Driskell (b. 1931), an artist and scholar of African-American
art.She also taught at Wilson Teachers
College, which became part of the District of Columbia Teachers College in 1955
and then incorporated into the University of the District of Columbia when UDC
was established in 1977, from 1953 to 1954.Returning in 1961 to Howard, one of the oldest traditionally black
colleges in the U.S. and one of the most prestigious, Lila was promoted to
Assistant Professor in 1964, to Associate Professor in 1966, and to full
Professor in 1971. She has also taught
master classes and as artist-in-residence or visiting instructor at schools all
over the country and abroad, and has lectured or given workshops around the
globe.Since 1991, after almost 44 years
of teaching printmaking, watercolor, drawing, and more to students like master
printmaker Lou Stovall (b. 1937) and prominent District artist Bill Harris (b.
1943), Lila’s been Professor Emerita at Howard.

“Teaching is very useful to an artist,” Lila declares. “You
learn a lot.”To be sure, the artist
found passing along her acquired knowledge and expertise to new generations “a
true calling,” in the words of LuLen Walker, the Art Collection Curator at Georgetown University Library’s Special Collections
Research Center.Former Howard
student White said he taught the same “life drawing techniques acquired from
Lila Asher” for over thirty years as a painting instructor at the Corcoran, and
in the catalogue for a retrospective of Lila’s work at Howard in 1991, the year
she retired, her former pupil Driskell,the chairman of the art department at the University of Maryland from
1978 to 1983 and later Distinguished University Professor of Art until his
retirement in 1998, wrote that he

remembers poignantly the clarity
with which Asher taught, extolling the virtues of keenly observing the beauty
of the human figure.The memorable
lectures she delivered to a small class of students in the early 1950s have
served as a model for those of us who have made teaching a lifelong commitment.

(Sydney Asher, by then a labor judge at NLRB, died of a
heart attack at 62 in 1974.Lila and
Sydney had two children, a son and a daughter.The artist remarried in 1978, to Kenneth Crawford, who had three
children from a previous marriage.Crawford, a one-time Howard colleague of Lila’s and then a language
specialist with the National Security Agency, died of cardiac arrest in 2006 at
86.Both men were World War II veterans
and, like Lila herself, active in philanthropy, service organizations, and
social issues in the Capital community.Though I must have known Sydney Asher, I don’t remember him, but I do
remember Ken Crawford as an extremely nice man.Ironically, I only just learned that Ken Crawford and I both studied
Russian at the Defense Language Institute—called the Army Language School in
his day—in Monterey, California,25
years apart.It may never have come up
because, as an NSA linguist, he probably couldn’t talk about his background;
the NSA is far more secretive than Military Intelligence, in which I had
served.)

The first class Lila taught at Howard was ceramics, but to
get to her studio she had to cross through the print classroom.That’s how she was introduced to printmaking,
which became her specialty.Lila’s an
internationally acknowledged authority on printmaking, all forms of which she’s
studied, made, and taught around the world for decades.She specializes in relief printing, in which the raised surfaces of the printing plate
or block are inked while the recessed faces remain ink-free (as
distinguished from intaglio printing, which is the exact reverse process); the
desired image, therefore, is carved into the block in reverse, like a sort of
photographic negative.The paper—Lila
selects a handmade paper of a specific texture for the effect she wants—is then
pressed or rubbed, which the artist prefers to do by hand with a Japanese baren, onto the incised block to create
the image.The artist even went to Japan
in 1973 to study the woodblock techniques of Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950; born Hiroshi Ueda), one of the great
masters of the artin a country admired for the
delicacy and expressiveness of its woodcuts over many centuries.The many nations abroad where she and her
work have appeared, often with a demonstration or workshop for local artists—as
she did in 1973 and ’74 on a tour of Japan and India under the auspices of the
U.S. Information Service (the same agency for which my father worked in Germany
a decade earlier)—also include Denmark,
Germany, Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Last year, Lila was selected to be one of the artists in ART
CART: Saving the Legacy, a project which preserves the works of aging artists
and connects them with art students in orderto prepare to document and archive the older
artists’ creative work for posterity.This program, started by Columbia University students in New York and now
expanding nationwide with D.C. one of the first cities to be added, also
returns Lila to teaching of sorts, or perhaps mentoring is the better word,
because the connection between the older, established artist and the younger
student artist is intended to pass on the legacy of America’s artistic culture.
Meanwhile, at almost 93, Lila continues
to create art in her studio in the Bethesda home filled with seven decades’ of
paintings, sculptures, and prints, and to exhibit in Washington and around the
world.Her process hasn’t changed since
she retired, but now “I can do it when I feel like it,” she says. “I sort of don’t know what else to do,” she
told a recent interviewer.“This is what
I’ve always done.”

The linoleum block, which for Lila is a sheet of linoleum
fastened to a block of wood, is the artist’s favorite print medium.“Unlike wood, which has grain you have to go
with or fight against,” the artists explains, “linoleum has no grain.You have complete control.”She has used many different media of
printing, including silkscreen and woodblock, but she returns to linocut
consistently—just as she returns to printmaking when she ventures into other
art forms such as watercolor, wire sculpture, terra cotta sculpture, and
stained glass.It may say something of
how special Lila’s print work is that Mom and I each own an Asher piece, both
prints (mine a lino print and Mother’s a woodblock).

Lila is widely renowned for the sensitivity and flow of line
in her linoleum block prints, which have been compared to those of Henri
Matisse, one of the principal elevators of the form above wallpaper patterns,
advertising images, and mere illustration.The artist’s “singular deployment of line” is almost always spotlighted
with special praise in reviews of her work.Harold Horowitz of The Washington
Print Club Quarterly, comparing her talent to that of “master draftsman”
Pablo Picasso, wrote that “the linear elements of the designs are very powerful
and are able to both define the forms and suggest the three dimensional
properties as well.”Frank Getlein, Washington-area
author, journalist, and art critic, declared: ”Our eye follows her line and
hears its music, even cues us to join the chorus. Her line sings sweetly, stands strongly,
builds like an architect, makes shadow and texture like a weaver, shapes life,
like the creator she is.”And in New
York, a reviewer for The Villager
asserted: “Her line is sharp. It has
authority; it has beautiful movement also.”

Lila’s work in other forms is far from ordinary or
uninteresting; that’s not what I mean.Her watercolors, which are mostly landscapes and street scenes—the
Washington Monument figures prominently in one, too, unsurprisingly,
considering her home base—and they’re colorful and endearing, with an
impressionistic cast.The scenes of
rural France and Germany, as well as the scenes of Washington, are so evocative
of the places themselves that I can smell the bread baking in Charcuterie Boucherie, France or feel
the mist rolling off the lake in Scotland.The sculptures, which include solid pieces
reminiscent of Auguste Rodin and wire figures that remind me of Alexander
Calder’s early work before he invented the stabile.The former are impressionistic like the
watercolors, suggesting emotion and a narrative behind the poses; the latter
pieces are whimsical and amusing and seemingly frivolous—three-D doodles.Lila’s stained glass medallions and panels,
meant to be hung in front of a window to catch the light while they sway or
spin to change the perspective, are pretty and gay, but more like an experiment
in light and color than a fully expressive artwork.

I’ve occasionally said of a friend who writes plays and
musicals that his adult fare is good and usually intriguing and unpredictably
funny—but his children’s scripts are special, incomparable.(I don’t know if he agrees with me on that,
though I’ve told him directly once or twice.)Well, Lila’s prints are like that: as good as all her work in other
forms is, and I’d be honored to display any of them in my home, her prints are
extraordinary, full of feeling and import which may not all have been her own
intent.(Good art makes the viewer feel
and see new things.Great art make the
viewer feel and see things that the artist herself didn’t plan.There are things in Shakespeare’s plays he
never consciously wrote about—but they’re there nonetheless.)As Lila herself makes clear: “The process of
printmaking is laborious and involves certain basics but there is always some
element of surprise along the way.That
is one of the things that make printmaking so fascinating.”

Of all my mother’s art—she and my dad started collecting in
a small way back in the late ’50s—her Asher woodblock is among my most
cherished.It’s Lila’s Medea, depicting the conflicted mythical
figure as embracing Mother (in black) juxtaposed with the nearly-identical
image (in blood-red) but all aflame, representing the Monster about to engulf
her children.It’s a remarkable piece,
as simple in composition as any of Lila’s work (or any other artist’s who works
in a minimalist vein), but fraught with power and impact.Even as a child—I don’t actually remember my
parents not having Lila’s Medea on a
wall in any of our homes—I was fascinated by and drawn to this dual image, even
before I knew the story of Medea, Jason, and their children.(I vaguely recall my dad telling me the story
as we looked at the print, but it wasn’t until I was a little older that I
really got into the Greek myths, much less any of the several version of the
story dramatized by playwrights from Euripides and Seneca to Pierre
Corneille to Jean Anouilh to Robinson Jeffers.)

My own Asher print, a linocut called Silence, is a more serene piece.It shows a young man, nude, a towel draped over his lap, seated in a
spoke-back chair in a variation of Rodin’s Thinker
pose.A black-and-white figure whose
face is buried in his hands, this young man isn’t so much contemplating
something deep, as Rodin’s subject is, but suffering some kind of despair.‘Why’s he so despondent?’ I wonder.‘What’s the backstory?’I can guess, of course, but I can’t
know.I wonder if Lila knew?I wonder if Lila knew the young man himself,
a real person who’d suffered some loss when she captured him?In my bedroom, Silence is displayed on a wall of all black-and-while pieces, an
initially accidental composition I deliberately extended when I hung the Asher,
and on the other side of my bed hangs another black-and-white portrait of a
boy, an untitled pen-and-ink sketch by Spanish artist Rafael Alvarez Ortega of
the rear view of a standing nude.Part
of a series of line drawings called “Los Niños del Mar” (“Children of the
Sea”), it’s a handsome drawing, but it’s emotionless, just an artist’s sketch
of a posed model, his left arm hanging by his side and his right arm raised,
the back of his wrist laid languidly against his forehead.The boy’s standing on the banks of the sea,
but he doesn’t seem to have any interest in the water or the shore—and neither
does the artist.In comparison with the
Ortega, Lila’s Silence is fraught,
emotion-laden, evocative, alive, and hot.In a review of a 2013 exhibit of Lila’s prints, the writer characterized
the artist as possessing “a reputation for clarity, grace, and emotional
content.”I couldn’t agree more from my
own private perspective.

Most of Lila’s prints are monochrome, predominantly black
on white like my Silence.(War
(mother and child) is rust-brown on white.)She likes to add a spot of color, usually red, in a single object in
many pictures—Eve’s apple, for instance, or the torch flame and sun’s rays in Prometheus.(Lila occasionally hand-tints the final
print, as in Pictures at an
Exhibition.)Almost all of her
prints have people in them—unlike the watercolors which are nearly exclusively
devoid of human presence.David Driskell
observed of Lila’s human figuration: “She works with it with love and passion
and endows each form with a realistic aesthetic that is bound in the classical
antecedents from which traditional art sprang.” She quips, “I think if I live long enough, I
may come into vogue.I think figures are
coming back.”Her subjects for the
prints—again, as differentiated from the other work—cover a small span:
mythological scenes (like the Medea, Prometheus), Biblical stories (Eve II, Noah
and the Ark), and scenes of daily life—what Robert Aubry Davis, the host
of WETA Arts, a program of the local
PBS station in Washington, called “everyday yet lyrical moments” (The Picnic, Hide and Seek III).Among
the last group, which Robert Taylor of the Boston
Globe says “celebrates the joys of everyday living and the uniqueness of
the ‘ordinary,’” are a subset that may be Lila’s most touching vision (and
possibly her most personal—Lila’s a mother and stepmother herself): portrayals
of the many incarnations of a mother and child (Airport Mother and Child, Mother
and Child in a Chair).Another
collection of “lyrical, timeless depictions of people enjoying everyday life,”
as Davis put it, is Lila’s prints of musicians at work (Saturday Night Gig, At the Harp).LuLen Walker
pronounces the artist a “keen observer of the human spirit.”

Early in Lila’s career, the Washington Star’s Benjamin Forgey noted that “the hallmark of her art . . . is
an extreme clarity of idea and style.”If
it’s not too hyperbolic to state it (and even if it is), every one of her
prints is warm with life, vibrant, and emotionally loaded.Sometimes it’s joy, sometimes love, sometimes
anger, sometimes playfulness—but it’s always life and living.“Evoking the figures on black figure vase
painting but distilled in the aesthetic of Japanese woodblock prints,” writes
Walker, “Asher’s classically charged imagery is a lyrical delineation of the
human form in quiet celebration of life and humanity.”What Lila gets out of a flat surface, a rigid
medium (in the sense that a block of wood or linoleum isn’t as manipulable as a
brush, a pen, or even a palette knife), and a limited color palette is
remarkable and inspiring.(As a writer,
I wish I could do with words what Lila does with ink.)She said that upon discovering printmaking in
that long-ago passage to her ceramics studio that she “fell in love with line.”Well, the “sensitive and flowing line” of her prints
reciprocated and has responded to Lila’s urgings and manipulations with
astonishing expressiveness, conveying
“profound human emotion with universal themes.”In New York City’s Park East, reviewer Dorothy Hall remarked that her print images “attest
not only to the artist's proficiency in draftsmanship but also to her great
warmth and sensitivity.”

Some of Lila’s prints are remarkable even among her
extraordinary body of work.In Noah and the Ark, for example, she not
only uses multiple colors (which in print work means a separate rubbing of the
paper and often a separate incised block for each color), but she achieves a
wonderful effect by combining print media.The olive-colored boat with Noah and the animal figures on the deck is
printed from a linoleum block, but the blue sea, with the waves and the ark’s
wake, is created by the grain of plywood.“The wood is scorched with a torch and then worked over with a wire
brush,” the artist explained. “This
wears down the softer part of the grain and the harder part remains higher for
inking,” creating the lighter and darker areas of ink that give the effect of
eddies and swirls in the water.In
addition to this mixed-media printing, the white dove in the right foreground
is cut out of the wood with a jigsaw, leaving open space that lets the white
paper show through the surrounding blue ink.(Just to increase to the complexity of Noah, Lila adds a red stripe around the ark’s gunwales.The dove is outlined in the same olive ink of
the boat, has a red eye, and carries a green olive branch in its beak.Each of these small details requires its own
block and pressing.)

The musical performances are sometimes multiple images,
usually to show motion or dynamism.Piano Concerto, another print
incorporating both linocut and woodblock printing, depicts a woman playing a
grand piano.(The grainy wood appears as
the wall of the auditorium with a ghostly conductor barely visible behind one
of the piano player’s images.The
woodcut is printed in brown to contrast with the black-inked musician.)The pianist is printed three times in
slightly variant poses, each image overlapping the previous one in a minutely
different size with her hands and head in different attitudes, creating the
impression of both movement and artistic intensity.For Jazz
Piano, a multi-colored linocut, Lila portrays the musical rhythms of the pianist
by repeating his image, identical in silhouette this time, in five different
colors (black, teal, mustard, orange, and red) in an arc from the lower-left
foreground curving up right center and back left again in the upper quadrant of
the paper.I’m not a jazz aficionado
(though my father was a huge fan), but to my eye, Jazz Piano replicates visually the energy of a jazz musician
jamming in improvised variations on a theme.

But just as dynamic as these images are, Lila captures
the serene figures with another kind of emotional impact, but one no less
evocative.Paul Richard, the art
reviewer of the Washington Post, comparing her work
to that of Henri Matisse for its “weight and warmth of flesh,” declared, “Lila
Oliver Asher’s prints are the finest when most simple, strongest when gentle.”The simplicity of childhood, say in the
comfort expressed in the red-black-and-white Cup of Milk (I swear I had a striped shirt just like that kidwhen I was his age—or maybe I just think I
did because of Lila’s image) or the uncomplicated joy of Hopscotch, both of which harken to a less fraught age (probably
when my brother and I and Lila’s children were growing up in suburban
Washington).The artist’s “stunningly
tender portrayal of lovers” are images of pure devotion, whether simply
embracing (The Window) or in motion
together (Skaters Waltz).And her mother-and-child pictures celebrate
the universal and undying maternal love in terms that defy the familiarity of
the subject.They are simultaneously
sentimental and elemental, depicting the symbiosis of the mother-child
relationship at a glance.In the Washington Post, writer Jo Ann Lewis maintained that Lila’s
best prints “are rendered with a single graceful arabesque, or series of
arabesques, that somehow convey . . . the tenderness of an embrace, a gesture
or touch . . . .”In an apt summation of
the artist’s art, Georgetown University’s Walker concludes that the artist’s
prints “reflect her optimistic outlook on life in the creation of timeless,
life-affirming prints that encourage thoughtful reflection and admiration.”

[The artist’s work is also part of
numerous collections, including: National Museum of American Art, Washington;
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington;
Barnett Aden Collection, Tampa, Fla.; University of Virginia; Sweet Briar
College, Sweet Briar, Va.; B'nai B'rith, Washington; City of Wolfsburg,
Germany; David Lloyd Kreeger Collection, Washington; Superior Court of the District
of Columbia, Washington; Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Washington;
Center for Research in Education of the Disadvantaged, Jerusalem, Israel;
Embassy of the United States, Tel Aviv, Israel; Embassy of the United States,
Mexico City, Mexico; Fisk University; Montgomery County Collection of
Contemporary Prints, Montgomery County, Md.; National Council on Art in Jewish
Life; American Jewish Congress, New York; Georgetown University; National Museum
of History, Taipei; Kastrupgårdsamlingen Kunst Museum; National Museum of Women
in the Arts, Washington; Jundt Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Wash.; and
many private collections in the U.S. (including my mother’s and mine!) and
abroad.]